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researchers have recently commenced an academic-industrial collaboration – EpiFemCare – to develop new methods for screening, diagnosing and personalising
treatment of breast and ovarian cancers.

The EpiFemCare project will develop
blood tests that will enable new and improved means of cancer detection, as well
as the evaluation of response to cancer treatment.

This innovative, collaborative research project is led by Professor Martin
Widschwendter from the Department of Women’s Cancer at the UCL EGA Institute for
Women’s Health. Collaborators include Charles
University (Prague, Czech Republic), Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich,
Germany), and companies with expertise in epigenetics and next generation
screening (GATC Biotech, Germany) and managing the large volumes of data
created by these experiments (Genedata, Switzerland).

Project Coordinator, Professor Widschwendter, said: “Currently many
women face an advanced ovarian cancer diagnosis or breast cancer over-diagnosis
due to lack of suitable tests of early detection or over-zealous screening
procedures. EpiFemCare scientists and clinicians are aspiring to change this
through the development of blood based tests with increased sensitivity for
ovarian cancers and increased specificity for breast cancers. The tests would
also allow us to predict patient response to treatment, thereby personalising
their treatment regimens”.

The research has been made
possible thanks to a €5.8 million
award from the European Commission. The project involves 6 partners in five
European countries and will run for three and a half years. It will use state-of-the-art
technologies in epigenetics, next generation sequencing and data management to
identify tumour markers present in blood and link these markers to the presence
of cancer.

Breast and ovarian cancers pose
huge and unsolved challenges to the medical profession. Breast cancer is the
most common cancer in women in the EU: more than 332,000 women are diagnosed
with breast cancer each year and a woman dies every six minutes from this
disease.

Ovarian cancer, whilst far less common than breast cancer, is often
diagnosed when at an advanced stage and has spread to other areas of the body. More
than 60 per cent of ovarian cancer patients die within the first five years after
diagnosis.

Implementation of successful
screening programs has dramatically reduced the number of women dying from
cervical cancer. Similarly, the EpiFemCare
project aims to halve the number of women who receive a
diagnosis of breast or ovarian cancer when that cancer is already advanced, halve the number of women who receive unnecessary long-term
chemotherapy, and reduce the number of women dying from these female cancers by
20 per cent.

The EpiFemCare project is partially funded by the European Union Seventh
Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (FP7) (Project number: 305428).